“Whoa!” Jesse threw up his left palm. “Now I see where our daughter gets her sass.”
“Mia does not get her sass from me,” Addy protested. “She acts just exactly like my grandmother. Let’s go home to the bunkhouse and get some sleep. We’ll feel better come morning.”
“I’ll see y’all at breakfast,” Cody yawned, “but, brother, if you wanted a few days to be lazy, all you had to do was ask me to do your work. You didn’t have to try to amputate your hand.”
“You were the serious one when you left home. What happened to make you so funny?” Jesse pushed back his chair and stood up.
“Life.” Cody grinned as he left the room.
* * *
Addy slipped her hand into Jesse’s on the way to the bunkhouse. “Want me to sleep on the sofa tonight so that…”
“No,” he answered before she could even finish the sentence.
“Dancing to that song tonight was important to me,” Jesse said as they crossed the distance from the back porch to the bunkhouse. “I’m not as romantic as a woman like you deserves, but when it started playing, I thought it would be the perfect time to tell my girlfriend that I’ve fallen in love with her.”
“Damn Patrick O’Malley for ruining that for your girlfriend. I know she would have loved to have heard those words while she was dancing to the song that says all those beautiful things,” Addy whispered.
“I imagine that Lylah is damning him pretty good tonight without my girlfriend heaping coals upon his head. So, as my best friend, do you really think my girlfriend is ready for me to say those words to her, or should I wait?” Jesse asked as he opened the door with his left hand and stood to one side.
“Lylah should have been there with him rather than helping clean up the church cupcake vendor site,” Addy said. “I would never let my husband go to a dance without me.”
“Oh, really?” Jesse raised both eyebrows. “What if your husband only has eyes for his beautiful wife and would never, ever, not in a million years, cheat on her?”
“Because Patrick can’t keep his hands and eyes off other women, I suppose you’re going to wait for another perfect moment to say those words to your girlfriend, aren’t you?” Addy sat down on the sofa and pulled off her boots. This idea of being Jesse’s best friend as well as his girlfriend was fun, and she really wanted to hear him say those words to her as his girlfriend, not as his best friend—romantic time and place didn’t matter. “What’s the difference in saying that you love me and that you’ve fallen in love with someone?”
“I love you as a friend, Addy. I have always loved you. That’s in the mind, but now I’m in love with you, and that goes deeper because it’s in the heart and soul. To have both is…” He sat down beside her and ran a fingertip down her cheek, “a miracle. I don’t think many people get that in their lives.”
Sparks danced around the room as his lips found hers in a long, lingering kiss. A fancy dinner with candles and white tablecloths and roses, or dancing to an emotional song could not have been more romantic than sitting right there on the sofa beside Jesse and feeling his lips on hers.
When the kiss ended, she gazed into his eyes and said, “I’m in love with you, too, Jesse Ryan, and everything is perfect right here, right now in this bunkhouse.”
Chapter Twenty-Four
Everything was too perfect. Jesse had said that he was in love with her. The two of them were settling down into a routine that she loved, but Addy wasn’t a teenager living in a world of unicorns and rainbows. The other shoe would drop, and that terrified her. She didn’t want the sweet little world she and Jesse were living in to crumble.
The temperatures were already in the high nineties that morning when she and Jesse headed into the office to finish up the week’s computer work. Jesse was getting restless, but even after the stitches came out of his hand, Cody had declared he needed another week of easy exercises before he went back to heavy lifting.
“I’m sick of this office,” he grumbled. “I want to be out there with Cody building the new barn.”
“It’s only until Monday,” Addy said. “We’ll be done with the office work by noon, and then we’ll drive into Bonham to get sheet metal for the roof. You’ll be out there in this miserable heat with him on Monday, so suck it up, cowboy,” Addy said.
“Is that my best friend or my girlfriend fussing at me?” he asked.
“Both,” she told him. “Weren’t you ever put on desk duty in the Air Force?”
“Only once, and I bitched about it the whole time,” he admitted.
Addy pulled a chair around to sit beside him at the desk. “You’re doing great with this, darlin’.”
“I can do it, but I don’t like it. I wish Lucas would come home. He’s as great at this stuff as he is with training horses,” Jesse said.
“Maybe he will sometime soon.” Addy had been around Jesse when he was in a foul mood, but that had been twenty years before, not recently. As they got the bookwork ready to go to the CPA to be checked for the next time quarterly taxes rolled around, she had to take the bad with the good, just like Jesse had to do with her mood swings.
They had just emailed all the material off to the CPA when Pearl poked her head in the door. “Grady is here and wants to talk to you, Addy. He’s out on the front porch swing.”
“What does he want?” Jesse asked.
“He didn’t volunteer, and I didn’t ask,” Pearl answered. “I just took out two glasses of sweet tea for y’all. The temperature has hit the triple digits now.”
Jesse stood up and flexed his wrist. “I guess if I was supposed to go, you would have taken three glasses of tea, right?”
Pearl nodded. “You can come on in the kitchen and help me make sandwiches for dinner. Mia and Cody are going to be in here in half an hour, and they’ll be starving.”
Addy kissed Jesse on the cheek before she left the room. “This won’t take long, and then I’ll come help get dinner on the table.”
“Maybe we can stop off for some ice cream or a snow cone after we get the sheet iron.” He smiled up at her.
“Sounds like a great idea to me,” she agreed.
She tried to stay positive, but she felt like she was in one of those dreams where she was trying to run and her boots felt like they were filled with concrete. Something wasn’t right. She could feel it all the way to the bottom of her heavy heart. Hopefully, the other shoe dropping didn’t have anything to do with Sonny’s health, not now, not when he and Pearl were finally going to have some freedom to travel.
“I thought when the other shoe dropped, it would be something between me and Jesse,” she whispered as she went out to the porch. “Hello, Grady, what’s going on?”
“Please, sit with me.” He patted the place beside him on the swing. “Have some tea.”
She picked up the full glass and sat down on the other end of the swing, keeping a couple of feet between them.
Don’t prolong the issue. Come right out and ask him what the hell he’s doing here, the voice in her head scolded.